Oh, it’s terrible when it has gone missing. And it goes missing A LOT these days.
Why? Well, it could have something to do with the remote control fairies that live in my house — grumbling, fat fairies with beer bellies and a desire to scratch all manner of regions while eating pork rinds and grumbling about baseball. It’s either them, or my 14-month-old daughter who would never hug a doll, but will cradle and cuddle the remote like it’s a kitten.
That is, when she’s not gnawing on it like a ravenous dog who has gotten hold of a soup bone. There is nothing worse than a baby-slimed remote that needs to be sanitized and pressure washed on a nightly basis.
I take that back: There is something worse, and that’s when the remote goes missing. At least when it’s dripping in saliva, you can use a pencil to change channels or put on gloves. But a missing remote just doesn’t work. And it will drive you batty.
Good luck finding it. When I ask my wife if she knows where it is, she tells me the last place she saw it. When I tell her it’s not there anymore, she just shrugs and says matter-of-factly, “It could be anywhere.”
Well, I know that! And that is exactly the problem. It not only could be anywhere. It IS anywhere. It’s there, because it sure ain’t here. And I will drive myself crazy looking for it.
Goodness knows I’m not going to just change the station on the TV. Inevitably, it’s always on channel 4 and I want to watch something on channel 168. That’s 164 stations I would manually have to click through. That could take years!
So I begin the hunt, and my shoulders get progressively tighter and more hunched over as I go. My eyebrows dip deeper down the horizon line of my forehead. And the longer it takes, the more I growl and grunt like a gorilla with a root canal.
It could be anywhere! So I look everywhere. One day I called home to ask my wife about something and heard this: “Yeah, let me get it. It’s wait a minute Hey! Don’t you dare put the remote control in the toilet ” and the line went dead.
So I always look in the toilet first. What a world, what a life. When it’s not there, I move on. Garbage cans next. Then sock drawers. I look in places too high for the little one to reach, because anything is possible. I look in the flour, just in case. I look in the toaster and the washing machine when I start running out of obvious spots.
Funny thing is you find all sorts of things while you’re looking.
“A soap dispenser behind the sofa? Hmmn. Guess it belongs there,” and I push the sofa back to cover it up. (My wife really isn’t going to be pleased when she reads that, but I was on a single-minded mission.)
One night I looked for 20 minutes, only to find it next to the TV on the TV stand. Now that’s just evil trickery by a little kid. She knows what she’s doing!
Other nights, I’ll look down and there the remote will be on the ottoman. Great. Two seconds later, the speedster dashes through, scoops it up and deposits it somewhere else.
Noooooo!!!!!!
I’m now considering chaining it to the sofa, or buying several of them. But until then I will just keep up my nightly hunts, and hope I never find it floating in the toilet.